Life Beyond Grad School

It’s kind of intimidating. Okay- really intimidating.

I am one of the fortunate second-year students to have a job offer in hand that I accepted back in October. Every day I feel more and more excited to start working in June and be able to apply all the ideas I have from my classes. And every night I feel more and more excited to dream about what I’m going to do with my first real salary 🙂

As someone who has been a full-time student for the past 17 consecutive years (virtually 77.2% of my entire life), it’s hard to imagine what life will be like after I graduate and start working. What will I do when I don’t have evening classes to attend 3 days a week? What will I do when I don’t have to spend my entire weekend writing papers and meeting with classmates to work on group projects? Thinking about all this free time has made me think about what I want to do with my life besides go to work every day: I want to buy and remodel houses.

During the Thanksgiving holiday, I did some house hunting in Lafayette, Indiana- where I will be living and working after graduation. I’ve decided that I want to buy a 3 bedroom fixer-upper, spend my evenings and weekends rehabilitating it, and then rent it. I consider myself to be a pretty handy person- and everyone who knows me considers me to be the kind of person who goes crazy when she doesn’t have some sort of project to work on! My ideal house is something that also has 2 bathrooms and was build around 1950 or later- something like this one that I saw. Believe me, the inside isn’t as cute as the outside:

The Barbie Dream House

So even though I’m 22, I put on my big-girl-trousers this weekend and acted like I knew what I was getting myself into. I have a feeling that by the time the first bathroom renovation is done, I just might end up wishing that I was back in graduate school- where things were easier!